Unit 2 - Colliding Cultures Focus Questions 1. Discuss different European justifications for colonization (power and empire, military, religious, economic, etc.) and compare and contrast their patterns of conquest of the New World. How do you explain the similarities and differences? 2. Why did the Jamestown settlement struggle initially, and how did tobacco change things? How did concepts of superiority first threaten the colony, then become the foundation for defeating the Powhatan and setting a pattern for English conquest of the New World? 3. How and why was the concept of race a fluid one during the early years of the Atlantic slave trade, and how did perceptions of “the other” contribute to the formation of racial identities and hierarchies in the Americas? 4. How and why were English Puritan settlements so different from other settlements in the Americas? What contributed to their increasing success? Key Terms Apalachee Jamestown “Black Legend” Tobacco “Middle Ground” Indentured servants Richard Hakluyt Puritan 20 Unit 2 – Colliding Cultures 21 Theodor de Bry, “Negotiating Peace With the Indians,” 1634, Virginia Historical Society. Introduction As described in the previous chapter, the Columbian Exchange transformed both sides of the Atlantic but with dramatically disparate outcomes. New diseases wiped out entire civilizations in the Americas, while newly imported nutrient-rich foodstuffs enabled a European population boom. Spain benefited most immediately as the wealth of the Aztec and Incan Empires strengthened the Spanish monarchy. Spain used its new riches to gain an advantage over other European nations, but this advantage was soon contested. Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and England all raced to the New World, eager to match the gains of the Spanish. Native peoples greeted the new visitors with responses ranging from welcoming cooperation to aggressive violence, but the ravages of disease and the possibility of new trading relationships enabled Europeans to create settlements all along the western rim of the Atlantic world. New empires would emerge from these tenuous beginnings, and by the end of the seventeenth century, Spain would lose its privileged position to its rivals. An age of colonization had begun and, with it, a great collision of cultures commenced. 2.1 – Spanish America Spain extended its reach in the Americas after reaping the benefits of its colonies in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America. Expeditions slowly began combing the continent and bringing Europeans into the modern-day United States in the hopes of establishing religious and economic dominance in a new territory. Juan Ponce de León arrived in the area named La Florida in 1513 where he found between 150,000 and 300,000 Native Americans. However, two and a half centuries of subsequent contact with European and African peoples—whether through war, slave raids, or, most dramatically, foreign disease—decimated Florida’s indigenous population. European explorers, meanwhile, had hoped to find great wealth in Florida, but reality never aligned with their imaginations. In the first half of the sixteenth century, Spanish colonizers fought frequently with Florida’s Native peoples as well as with other Europeans. In the 1560s Spain expelled French Protestants, called Huguenots, from the area near modern- day Jacksonville in northeast Florida. In 1586 English privateer Sir Francis Drake burned the wooden settlement of St. 22 Unit 2 – Colliding Cultures Augustine. At the dawn of the seventeenth century, Spain’s reach in Protestants - members of Christian Florida extended from the mouth of the St. Johns River south to the churches that separated from the Roman environs of St. Augustine—an area of roughly 1,000 square miles. Catholic Church during and after the The Spaniards attempted to duplicate methods for establishing sixteenth-century Protestant control used previously in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Andes. Reformation, which initially sought to The Crown granted missionaries the right to live among Timucua address corruption and abuses in and Guale villagers in the late 1500s and early 1600s and Catholic practice and organization encouraged settlement through the encomienda system (grants of Indian labor).1 In the 1630s, the mission system extended into the Apalachee district in the Florida panhandle. The Apalachee, one of the most powerful tribes in Florida at the time of contact, claimed the territory from the modern Florida-Georgia border to the Gulf of Mexico. Apalachee farmers grew an abundance of corn and other crops. Indian traders carried surplus products east along the Camino Real (the royal road) that connected the western anchor of the mission system with St. Augustine. Spanish settlers drove cattle eastward across the 1513 Atlantic map from cartographer Martin Waldseemuller. Wikimedia. St. Johns River and established ranches as far west as Apalachee. Still, Spain held Florida tenuously. Farther west, in 1598, Juan de Oñate led four hundred settlers, soldiers, and missionaries from Mexico into New Mexico. The Spanish Southwest had brutal beginnings. When Oñate sacked the Pueblo city of Acoma, the “sky city,” the Spaniards slaughtered nearly half of its roughly 1,500 inhabitants, including women and children. Oñate ordered one foot cut off every surviving male over age fifteen, and he enslaved the remaining women and children.2 By 1608 the Spanish declared New Mexico a royal province and Santa Fe (“holy faith” in Spanish) became the capital for New Mexico, the first permanent European seat of government in what would become the United States, in 1610. Few Spaniards relocated to the Southwest because of the distance from Mexico City and the dry and hostile environment. Thus, the Spanish never achieved a commanding presence in the region. By 1680, only about three thousand colonists called Spanish New Mexico home.3 There, they traded with and exploited the local Puebloan peoples, and established extensive missions for indigenous relocation and Catholic conversion; in 1680 there were fifty Catholic monasteries and churches in New Mexico. These changes had wrought significant distrust and devastation among Native Americans in the region, as well as oppressive persecution of traditional practices and beliefs. In 1680, a spiritual healer named Popé launched a simultaneous uprising of Native American Missions - ministry settlements villagers and mission inhabitants throughout the region. This Pueblo Revolt established with the goal of (also called Popé’s Rebellion) focused on destroying Spanish mission religious conversion authorities: Popé and his followers burned Catholic churches, destroyed relics, and executed more than 400 Spanish settlers (21 of whom were priests). The Pueblo Revolt is considered the greatest defeat for European colonizers in North America, and the Spanish would not regain control of the New Mexico province for twelve more years. Despite Popé’s victory, indigenous inhabitants of New Mexico could not maintain after decades Unit 2 – Colliding Cultures 23 of hardship and devastation. The region’s Puebloan population had plummeted from as many as sixty thousand in 1600 to about seventeen thousand at the time of the Pueblo Revolt.4 Spain shifted strategies after the military expeditions wove their way through the southern and western half of North America. Missions became the engine of colonization in North America. Missionaries, most of whom were members of the Franciscan religious order, provided Spain with an advance guard in North America. Catholicism had always justified Spanish conquest, and colonization always carried religious imperatives. By the early seventeenth century, Spanish friars had established dozens of missions along the Rio Grande and in California. 2.2 – Spain’s Rivals Emerge While Spain plundered the New World, unrest plagued Europe. The Protestant Reformation threw England and France, the two European powers capable of contesting Spain, into turmoil. Long and expensive conflicts drained time, resources, and lives. Millions died from religious violence in France alone. As the violence diminished in Europe, however, religious and political rivalries continued in the New World. The Spanish exploitation of New Spain’s riches inspired European monarchs to invest in exploration and conquest. Reports of Spanish atrocities spread throughout Europe and provided a humanitarian justification for European colonization. An English reprint of the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas bore the sensational title “Popery Truly Display’d in its Bloody Colours: Or, a Faithful Narrative of the Horrid and Unexampled Massacres, Butcheries, and all manners of Cruelties that Hell and Malice could invent, committed by the Popish Spanish.” An English writer explained that the Indians “were simple and plain men, and lived without great labour,” but in their lust for gold the Spaniards “forced the people (that were not used to labour) to stand all the daie [sic] in the hot sun gathering gold in the sand of the rivers. By this means a great number of them (not used to such pains) died, and a great number of them (seeing themselves The earliest plan of New Amsterdam (now Manhattan), 1660. Wikimedia. brought from so quiet a life to such misery and slavery) of desperation killed themselves. And many would not marry, because they would not have their children slaves to the Spaniards.”5 The Spanish accused their critics of fostering a “Black Legend.” The Black Legend drew on religious differences and political rivalries.